Brexit: A Requiem for the Post-National Society?

It might be argued that one of the limits of EUrope that has been revealed most starkly by Brexit is the EU’s ‘normative power’ claim to represent universalisable political values (Manners, 2002) – that is, values beyond the nation state. Most leading EU scholars are of a generation and career formation which viewed the EU as the best likely vehicle of carrying forward what was left of the ‘enlightenment project’, amid the sharp breakdown in the 1970s and 1980s of belief in utopian teleologies, heralded by post-modern and post-colonial thought. The European ‘dream of the nineties’ (for that is what it was) was most famously articulated in the writings of Habermas and Beck on post-national ideals and the cosmopolitan potential of the EU (Habermas, 1998; Beck and Grande, 2007; see also Delanty and Rumford, 2005; Delanty, 2009).